One handy thing about having young children is that it’s given me a good excuse to knock off work and play with blocks. I love building blocks. I could spend hours just building towers and letting my 2-year-old knock them down. It’s one of the purest delights I know.

I procrastinate. I play with blocks. I have lots and lots of blocks, wooden blocks, and you should see the palaces I construct. Not giving the subject the slightest thought. Awash in pure formfulness. Puzzles and revelations surrounding structure. Days pass. Weeks, (Obviously somewhere in the back of my mind, I am sorting out structural issues regarding my writing as well, but not consciously.) At length, palace-building all the while, I begin to thrum around about structural questions in the piece: what if I led instead with X? And, hey, wait, it’s weird, but that P section rhymes with the T, S could go before P, and we could flip M and N. Hmmm. And this sort of thing becomes more and more interesting to me. Presently compellingly interesting. (The polarities reverse, and now the empty page is magnetized north and the rest of the world south: The house is burning down? Who cares.)

These blocks belong to your daughter?
No, my daughter is not allowed to play with these blocks. They are mine.

And what do you do with these blocks?
Well, my wife, who is an important human rights monitor, and my daughter, who has been off at school, will come home and see the elaborate cathedral I’ve built on the kitchen table. And they’ll say, “We see you’ve been busy today.” And I have!

Later, he’s asked how the block palaces he builds actually get translated into writing:

I tape large one-by-three-foot blank sheets together to create a kind of a blotter. I doodle and sketch a lot on the blotter. I make little diagrams to connect things. The point is to lay out and visualize the structures I’ve been thinking through when I was playing with the blocks.

There is something magical that happens when you move things around with your hands — it frees up your mind to think. (Just now I was doing the dishes and came up with the images for a talk I am working on.)

Weschler is not the only creative adult who plays with blocks — so does the designer Tucker Viemiester. When he found out his mom donated his old blocks to Head Start, he made her get them back so that he could have them for himself:

What Mr. Viemeister, who has brought the spirit of fun and practicality to a wealth of products, most famously the Oxo kitchen utensils, values most about the blocks is how plastic they are, even though they are made of wood. With Legos, he said, the play process is more tilted toward a goal: the house or ship or castle that you build and are finished with. The Unit Blocks — with nothing to hold them together, and difficult to move when assembled — encourage a more fluid, open-ended process that is never quite finished and easily started anew.

What’s interesting about building blocks is that they were not always such a commonplace item in the lives of young children. As Norman Brosterman writes in his fantastic book, Inventing Kindergarten, “it is something of a surprise to discover that, like kindergarten itself, they have not been with us forever.”

The kind of children’s blocks we think of today can be traced back to kindergarten’s inventor, Friedrich Fröbel, who included blocks as one of his “gifts” to students. He specifically designed them to be “plastic” in the way that Tucker Viemeister points out makes them so great. Froebel hated the way most kids’ toys and models in the nineteenth century were basically like the packaged pre-destined LEGO kits of today, where there is a “right” way to put them together, a final shape to build step-by-step towards, so he made his block sets pure geometry, “Nonspecific, open-ended, and symbolic.” Here’s a picture of some of the block sets from Inventing Kindergarten:

Later, Caroline Pratt, founder of City and Country School, and author of the great book I Learn From Children, developed the “Unit blocks” we know best today from preschool and kindergarten. She was trying to figure out a good way to bring the world into the classroom. She wanted to help children discover the world by re-building it in miniature.

She had taught manual arts and knew hot to work with wood. From pieces of maple she made sets of building blocks in basic shapes, each shape in proportion with the others so they could adjoin each other in simple multiples…. [They] became the most widely used elementary-level playtime blocks in the country… She couldn’t patent her Unit Blocks — in them she had discovered something too basic to claim, as if she had invented water—but their acceptance by day care centers and nursery and elementary schools is by now close to unanimous.

Frazier points out that the blocks, which were designed to mimic architecture, ended up influencing architecture itself. This is exactly Brosterman’s thesis in Inventing Kindergarten: that kindergarten’s emphasis on geometry and abstraction had a part to play in the beginning of abstract art and modern architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, was one of the first generation of students in Froebel-style kindergarten, and fondly remembered his Froebel blocks.)

This is one of those poems you tape to the fridge. It ran in the May 18, 1998 issue of the New Yorker. You can find it in Koch’s Collected Poems. I love it because unlike many when they talk about “work-life balance,” there’s no value judgment, no correct answer, just Koch laying out the choices. Work, family, or friends: pick two. You can have it all, just not all at once. (Seasons, man.)

I thought of it again today because Jocelyn Glei made a supercut of some of her podcast guests’ answers to the question “What’s the key ingredient in work-life balance?” My answer was included in the batch (something about loving something more than your work, irreverence, ego, blah blah blah) but I wish I’d just recited the Koch.

One thing I did think was interesting: of the six guests, the two men, myself included, didn’t question whether such a thing as “work-life balance” was possible, while two of the women, both friends of mine, said they didn’t really believe in it or think about it — they didn’t see a big distinction between their work and their lives. On the whole, women have, historically, if they were lucky enough to have creative careers at all, not had much of a choice of easily separating work and life. (I think of poor Clara Schumann, raising seven kids as a widower and a performing artist. I mean, damn.)

There’s a great 2008 conversation between Muriel Murch and Eleanor Coppola on Murch’s podcast, Living With Literature, in which Coppola talks about the challenges of raising a family and supporting her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, while trying to do find time to do her creative work, too. She says she was always “trying to reconcile these two sides of myself.” She talks about being relieved to start shooting documentary footage on-set during Apocalypse Now, so she had something creative to do with her talents other than go to the grocery and find a dry cleaner. (Read more in her books, Notes on a Life and Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now.)

At one point, Coppola speaks explicitly about the different ways that men and women (with families) of her generation worked on their art:

The men artists I knew had a studio, and they went out to their studio, and they spent the day, and worked, and then they came back. I once read a book by Judy Chicago, who interviewed all these women artists, and they made their art on the back porch, they made it on top of the washing machine, they made it next to the kitchen sink, and they made it anywhere they could, for the hour and a half while their kid was taking a nap, and for the two hours while they were at the play group. They made it in between. It wasn’t, like, you get to make art for eight hours. You make art in 20-minute snatches, and you don’t, like, fiddle around. I know one time I went to see Francis in his working room, and he had his pencils all laid out, and his espresso there, and there was this whole little ritual of getting into yourself and into your work. There was no time [for women] for the ritual of getting into your work! You just snapped into that taking 10 minutes and making 3 lines on your drawing or whatever was possible. It wasn’t the same as the way men worked. And that’s how women got their work done.

Tillie Olsen, in Silences, writes: “More than any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interuption, not continuity.” A mother can’t avoid interruptions, so she has to find a way of “scurrying,” as Muriel Murch puts it.

Coppola speaks of having to escape out into the garden, just to “catch a breath” and “hear yourself” and have some time with that creative voice that was speaking to her, and what a terrific luxury it was, later in life, when she was 60, and her kids were gone, and she could have a little studio of her own, outside the house, where she could work uninterrupted. (In spite of all she had to give up, she says she’s thrilled that her children are all good, creative people. “I think they’re my greatest artwork.”)

People always ask me how I managed to paint when my two boys were small. My children were a joy to me, and there was no problem working with them around — I just let them play at my feet as I painted. They would even run toy fire engines up and down my easel, but it didn’t bother me.

What is really the issue here is a sense that art and domesticity don’t play nicely together. Here’s Tom Waits:

Family and career don’t like each other. One is always trying to eat the other. You’re always trying to find balance. But one is really useless without the other. What you really want is a sink and a faucet. That’s the ideal.

Maybe family and career are at odds, but I don’t think family and art-making absolutely have to be. I take a lot of inspiration from artists deep in domesticity. (Literally: “home or family life.”) From a New Yorker profile of Ursula K. Le Guin:

At a little kitchen table, over tea served in the indestructible handmade earthenware mugs of the seventies, she commented, somewhat defiantly, that she had always taken pleasure in cooking and keeping house. It sounded like criticism of the heroic writer, alone in his garret, but there’s more to it than that. She feels that marriage and family have given her a stability that supported her writing—the freedom of solitude within the solidity of household life. “An artist can go off into the private world they create, and maybe not be so good at finding the way out again,” she told me. “This could be one reason I’ve always been grateful for having a family and doing housework, and the stupid ordinary stuff that has to be done that you cannot let go.”

In the documentary Look & See, Wendell Berry talks about how he thinks art-making is actually given meaning by interruption. Here’s writer Winn Collier’s recollection of a discussion with Berry on the topic:

You have been given a gift to help you resist the temptation to believe that your writing must never be interrupted. The modern idea that our art must always come first and never be interrupted is complete BS. I can’t live that way with my land. When you have a mule and it needs something, you can’t tell it to wait. I can’t tell Tanya to wait. I couldn’t tell my kids to wait, I still can’t most times. I can’t help but be interrupted by my neighbor. Now, I have some ways of being unfindable when I have to be, but I’m going to be interrupted.

Here’s what I’m trying to do with my life and my work. I’m trying to fully integrate everything. So the transition from work to play to everyday life is all seamless. So that it’s all one thing. There’s no difference between living and making art. I’ve gotten really close. Music, comics, writing, painting, playing with Eli, doing dishes, cooking, all that, fully integrated into one seamless unit. That’s pretty much my goal…

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

It’s not going to happen for everybody, of course. In the end, you get away with whatever you can get away with. You live however you need to.

I really did not mean to write so much in this post, but I wanted to wrap up with this story from the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal, a great writer and mother of three, who put “You Want A Social Life With Friends” in her book, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, and met Kenneth Koch:

In the fall of 2000, I had the privilege of recording Mr. Koch reading this poem in his Upper East Side apartment for an audio magazine project I was working on. I used a tiny Radio Shack tape recorder, and take full responsibility for the lack of high sound quality. (But I do admit I like the crackling and soundproof-lessness.) He was an impeccable, flawless reader–we were finished in two or three takes. Though he had been reluctant to agree to our session, once underway, he was a gracious, charismatic host. He had set up a nice tray with glasses of grapefruit juice. Fitting, because the whole thing was bittersweet. Mr. Koch died a year later. I believe this is one of his last recordings.

A few years ago, I copied this Magritte painting* on my son Owen’s chalkboard, and captioned it, “How To Raise A Surrealist.”

I have discovered that little jokes like this often turn out to be forecasts, or tiny prophesies.

A case in point: Our son Jules has begun captioning the things that appear on our morning walks. A squirrel is “squirrel,” and an apple is “apple,” but the jack-o-lanterns on porches are “October,” and fake skeletons hanging from trees are “x-rays.”

What I know now is that you don’t need to raise a surrealist — children are born surrealists, and we talk them out of it.

I did not, to my memory, know Emberley’s books when I was growing up, but when I discovered them in my 20s, he instantly became one of my heroes.

I not only love his books, I’m inspired by the way he and his wife Barbara collaborated on classic books like Drummer Hoff and The Story of Paul Bunyan, all while raising their kids, Rebecca and Michael, both of whom grew up to become illustrators and now have creative families of their own. (On the family business, Rebecca remembers, “Our parents would say ‘Think up something you can make and sell it.’”) I used a quote of Ed’s in Steal Like An Artist, and a few years later, Rebecca sent me of a snapshot of her dad reading it. I framed it and hung it on my studio wall and I look at it whenever I feel worthless.

Now that I have my own marker-wielding boys, I leave the Emberley books out for them to find. My son Owen, who’s about to turn 5 this month, likes to copy out of the Drawing Book of Trucks and Trains, although he also likes to skip most of the steps and copy the final drawing.

“Most children are at least as creative as adult artists are until they get to first or second grade,” Ed says. “Your job is to bring them back.”

I try so hard to provide the life I always wanted for my boys, and I want so much for them to enjoy the things I love, to see me working, and to work alongside me. But I’m always mindful of Andrew Solomon, who wrote in Far From The Tree, “Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not.”

I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.

Example: This week I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, and I wanted to see the lives of all the composers on a timeline. Instead of googling for one, I decided to just make one for myself with a pencil in my notebook. It was kind of a pain, but I had a feeling I’d learn something. Pretty much immediately I was able to see connections that Swafford wrote about that just hadn’t sunken in yet, like how Haydn’s life overlapped both Bach’s and Beethoven’s while covering Mozart’s completely. Had I googled a pre-made timeline, I’m not completely sure I would’ve studied it closely enough to get as much out of it as the one I drew.

Another example: I copy passages of text that I like longhand in my notebook, and it not only helps me remember the texts, it makes me slow down enough so that I can actually read them and think about them, even internalize them. Something happens when I copy texts into my notebook that does not happen when I cut and paste them into Evernote or onto my blog.

A lot of this way of studying has been inspired by my son, Owen.

Even before I had kids, I wrote, “We learn by copying… Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.” Funny now that I have a four-year-old budding mechanic, who actually spends a great deal of his time copying photos and drawings of cars, taking them apart in his mind and putting them back together on the page to figure out how they work.

What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.) Milton Glaser says that “drawing is thinking.” I think that drawing is learning, too, and one thing Owen has taught me is that it is more valuable as a verb than it is as a noun.

I felt sure that my children would teach me more than I taught them. I was not anticipating that they would actually teach me how to learn again…

If you have a child of two or three, or can borrow one, let her give you beginning lessons in looking.
—Corita Kent and Jan Steward, Learning By Heart

This weekend we visited the Umlauf Sculpture Garden here in Austin. Towards the end of our visit, I spent at least half an hour at the very edge of the garden with my back to the beautiful art and scenery, watching the cars whiz by on Robert E. Lee Road.

Going to an art museum with a two-year-old will make you rethink what’s interesting and what’s art. (After all, what are cars but fast, colorful, kinetic sculptures?) This, of course, should be the point of museums: to make us look closer at our everyday life as a source of art and wonder.